There’s something lurking in the water this November, as the award winning Soho Horror Film Festival returns to both the big and little screen with it’s annual hybrid festival. And, today, they’re teasing their first tidal wave release of films for the 2025 event.
Ready to wrap its tentacles around you, the festival is delighted to be premiering the Sundance favourite Touch Me. From director Addison Heimann (Hypochondriac), this twisted and salacious psychosexual horror comedy follows two codependent best friends, as they become addicted to the heroin-like touch of an alien narcissist that may or may not be trying to take over the world. A horny hentai hyper-pop fever dream unafraid to hit on some harrowing emotional realities, this is the cosmically carnal tale of your dreams featuring two knock out performances from genre darlings Lou Taylor Pucci (Evil Dead, Spring) and Olivia Taylor Dudley (Onyx the Fortuitous and She Dies Tomorrow).
Continuing the festival’s long standing celebration of queer excellence, Zack Ogle and Aaron Pagniano’s It Needs Eyes has its European Premiere. Desperate to escape her sleepy coastal town as well as her own traumatic past, teenager Rowan seeks solace doom scrolling until she uncovers an increasingly bizarre case of a missing woman known only as Fish Tooth, who she believes is calling out through the screen for help. Capturing the all-consuming and impenetrable terror of both digital obsession and the depths of the ocean, this might be one of the most sharp and stylish scare fests of the year.
If that’s not unhinged enough for you, the festival has chummed the waters and caught a big one with the UK Premiere of Hot Spring Shark Attack. Leave your logic at the shore for this bonkers love letter to Jaws (which happens to be celebrating it’s 50th anniversary this year.) Armed with only bath bombs, bureaucrats, and baffling VFX, a rag tag group of villagers battle an ancient evil shark that is destroying their spa trade. Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the hot spring…
For shark fans that can’t make the theatrical London based festival; it’s digital counterpart, the SoHome Horror Fest, will also be hosting a wild screening of sharksploitation madness. However, this one will be kept a total surprise until it bursts through the surface – or laptop screen- at the event, so get guessing. Why have just one jawsome film screening when you can celebrate two, as the festival will host a live edition of the brilliant Not Another Teen Podcast yapping all things Shark Night (2011).
The virtual weekend of the festival will also host the UK Premiere of What The Tide Dragged In, a seaside shocker from Patricio Valladares (Invoking Yell). In this eerie, emotionally charged horror tale, two sisters journey to Chile's remote coast to scatter their mother's ashes—until one vanishes into the sea and returns changed, sparking a haunting descent into grief, suspicion, and something not entirely human.
And that’s just a tease of what terrors and treats the festival has for you, with the full lineup being revealed in early October; but “Early Shark” tickets are on sale now via their website.
The Soho Horror Film Festival will run from 21st-23rd November at the truly unique cinematic speakeasy, the Coldharbour Blue Cinema in Brixton, London. While the Sohome Horror Film Festival will run from the 28th-30th November, and will be fully accessible online. Tickets for day passes, individual tickets and the virtual event will go on sale in October.
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